Parma, the home of parmesan cheese

No visit to Parma would be complete without a cheese factory tour and a tasting of the famous Parmigiano Reggiano, aka parmesan cheese, and so that is exactly what we did! We drove about 6km out of town to the San Pier Damiani 'dairy' (the cheese factory) and learnt about the cheese making process. It was really interesting but we were surprised, in this day and age, at how manual their processes were. No fancy machines moving things along the production, everything is done by hand - a huge undertaking. After the tour we were able to sample three types of parmesan - one that had been aged for 12 months, another that had been made using the milk from brown cows (as they are known in Italy but in NZ we know them as Jersey cows) and aged for 15 months, and another that had been made using the milk from Friesian cows and also aged for 15 months. All nice tasting cheeses. A surprise addition to the tour was a small tractor museum that was also on site; this was purely self-guided and Neil was in his element.
We then took a trip into town (Parma is a university town) to have a look around but nothing really appealed and we were sweltering in 31-degree temperatures so we drove back to the comfort of our air-conditioned hotel.Read more